An Enemy of the Thomas Merton Society David Martin, Hyattsville, Maryland
Introduction ICN continues its series on the death facts of Thomas Merton. (See editorial page 4). This article is excerpted for space reasons. (See the ICN website for the full text.)
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still remember vividly my excitement a half century ago when I discovered Henrik Ibsen’s great play, An Enemy of the People, in a collection of Ibsen’s complete works that I had bought the year of my graduation from college. I had never before encountered such a great depiction of one of the major shortcomings of the human race, our tendency to reject the truth when strong vested interests are tied up in falsehood, and there it was, condensed into dramatic form that one could take in in a little more than an hour. In a nutshell, the principal protagonist, Thomas Stockmann, a medical doctor in a small Norwegian town, through his research has discovered that beyond a shadow of a doubt the cause of a series of mysterious deaths that have chilled the town’s tourist economy is pollution of the water supply by the other pillar of the town's economy, a tannery. He really has it down to a scientific certainty, and he can hardly wait to share his findings with everyone. Understandably, he regards himself as a hero for what he has found and thinks that his fellow townsmen will see him that way as well. Like a doctor performing at his best, he has correctly diagnosed the illness, the first necessary step for curing it. But how wrong he turned out to be! Instead, his experience is captured by the title of the play, with Dr. Stockmann as the title character. He had learned too much for his own good. He was lucky not to have been tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail. Another Disquieting Discovery Now let us flash forward to 2018. Hugh Turley and I had discovered that the almost universally believed story that the great anti-war writer and Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, died by accidental electrocution in December 1968 by a faulty fan that he touched upon emerging from a shower while at a conference in Thailand is almost certainly false. Through research, we had learned that according to all the local documentation, the death certificate, the doctor’s certificate, and the police report, the cause of death had been “heart failure” and that it had also been reported that way in the Thai news organs. The police—in at least what is purported to be their
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report—had concluded that Merton was already dead when he fell into a fan in his bedroom in which a faulty cord “had been installed.” The police report described how Merton was found in his bedroom lying on his back, wearing only shorts, with the fan lying across his body. The stand of the floor fan that had left burns on his body had also left burn marks on the shorts. This description of the death scene is corroborated by a diagram drawn by one of the witnesses and, most importantly, by two photographs taken by another of the witnesses. That scene as described virtually rules out any possibility that Merton was wet from a shower when he encountered the fan, and, in fact, the only mention of a shower in any contemporary account was in the statement by the best witness that he looked like he might have been getting ready to take a shower. The only substantive difference between the observations—as opposed to the conclusions—of the witnesses and the police report is that the witnesses saw a bleeding wound in the back of Merton’s head. The police made no mention of it. No autopsy was performed, although the Thai authorities indicated, falsely, that one had been done “in accordance with law.” In 1980, Merton’s secretary at his home Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, Brother Patrick Hart, told the press, incredible as it may sound, that they had been told that if an autopsy had been done in Thailand, Thai law required that the deceased would have to be buried in Thailand. The U.S. military had hastily taken possession of the body and moved it to a U.S. military hospital, where an autopsy could have been done, but one was not done there either or when the body was returned to Kentucky.
Island Catholic News
Meanwhile, what the American public was told, and therefore what they thought they knew, was simply what was reported by the Associated Press, that is that, according to anonymous “Catholic sources,” Merton had been accidentally electrocuted by a faulty fan. Doubtless the image that almost everyone conjured up in their minds was some squalid, run-down Third World place with faulty equipment everywhere and Merton had not exercised the proper caution when handling it. In fact, the conference was at a fairly modern Red Cross retreat center in a suburb of Bangkok with lots of amenities. But who’s ever heard of a household appliance killing anyone, in the Third World or elsewhere, except maybe in one of those rare instances where a plugged-in radio or hair dryer or some such falls into a bathtub? People might even have painted into the picture a bath or a shower in their minds to get that electricity-conducting water into it. I imagine that hardly anyone noticed at the time that there was no mention of a bath or a shower in that early news report. There would not be such mention until almost five years later when Brother Patrick wrote in the postscript to the 1973 volume that he co-edited, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, that Merton was wet from having just taken a shower when he touched the faulty fan. As I wrote in my June 7, 2018, article, “Parade of Whoppers about Thomas Merton’s Death”, “Brother Patrick is the man who, in effect, added water to the Merton death recipe, and he did it almost five years after the event.” He also did it without a shred of evidence to support it, and he admitted to us in a telephone message that he had none, rather, he said, the weather was “steamy” and Merton “must have taken a shower.” But that was not how he had written it, and it was not long before a shower or a bath became part of the death picture as painted by virtually every “authority” on Thomas Merton’s life, by every “expert,” if you will, as noted in “Parade of Whoppers” and as one can see further sampled on our web site for the book that Hugh Turley and I wrote, The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation. The story of Thomas Merton having accidentally electrocuted himself while wet from a shower or bath had been, in effect, institutionalized through repetition rather than through evidence when we came out with the book in March of 2018. There is lots more in the book that shows that there was never a trace of what one might call “analysis” behind
the seemingly confident assertions of Merton “experts” on how the man died, but what we have briefly presented here at least begins to tell the story. The International Thomas Merton Society On the eve of publication, we found ourselves in what one might call “Dr. Stockmann territory.” Merton might not be as well known as two other violent death victims of questionable origin in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, but at least in one quarter he is very well known and admired. This is from page 2 of the book: “The International Thomas Merton Society (ITMS), formed in 1987, has 46 chapters in the United States and there are 19 chapters and affiliated societies in other countries. The ITMS has four-day conferences on a biennial basis at various sites. Two of the first 13 conferences were in Canada; the rest were in the United States.” What a perfect natural audience for the book, we thought. How eager should they be to discover that the death of the man they admire was not the fluke, the almost ridiculous occurrence that we had all been led to believe it was all these years! A big reason why we expected our book to be well received by the ITMS is reflected in the following poem, which I thought up later, and in the book’s title: Thomas Merton’s Martyrdom They say his death was meaningless. That ’ s what they want us to swallow. But in light of all the evidence, Their argument rings hollow. His life was full of purpose, But we must to the world confide: His words had no more meaning Than the things for which he died. Unreported in the book is the fact that the ITMS also puts out four publications a year called The Merton Seasonal as well as The Merton Annual. What perfect venues they would be, we thought, for getting out the word! In fact, our book has been well received. One can see it from the customers’ reviews on Amazon and particularly from a number of articles that have been written about it, noted at the book’s web site. For a book that has received no publicity from the media, including the major Catholic media, sales have been good and steady. Turley and Martin as Dr. Thomas Stockmann From the ITMS, though, it has been the Dr. Stockmann treatment for us. To date, we know of only one Continued on page 7
Winter - 2019/20